


cut yourself on the pieces

by cateliot



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Bahrain, Bullets, F/M, Nightmares, Pain, Post-Episode: s03e07 Chaos Theory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, all the broken pieces, subtle references to self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-22 13:23:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6080961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cateliot/pseuds/cateliot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day, in this world, or perhaps another, it would hurt less to love her.<br/>(Or: Phil seeks out Melinda days after Lash's identity is revealed only to find the broken remains of his partner.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	cut yourself on the pieces

::

**_“I am so tired of feeling like the shattered vase across a slippery floor and I am so tired of watching you tip toe around the pieces so you don’t cut yourself on me.” (Tyler Knott Gregson)_ **

::

Four days after Lash’s identity was revealed, he found her in Andrew’s temporary office.  Papers and print outs lined the walls, scribbled in Chinese script.  Photos of Ward sightings, the ATCU backgrounds and files were linked with timelines and other HYDRA events.  There were lines of medical links and chemical compositions.

Nothing on Andrew’s desk had been touched.  The files, the laptop, the chair, her photo, all hadn’t moved.  It was like she was moving around his presence in the room.  So he wasn’t surprised to find her in the corner of the room, facing the door with the tablet in her lap and more files and paper thrown out in a halo around her.

It was a defensive position. 

He had seen her spiral before and knew that the innate sense of fight that Lian had taught her as a child before she even knew she was learning would prevent her from making a mistake that could cost her her life. 

_Unless she wanted it to._

Before he shut the door it was clear she hadn’t slept.  Not that he expected her to.  He sat down on the wall adjacent to her, not speaking for a few moments before sighing.

“Hey.”

It was a stupid thing to say, and he knew it.  But there were words that he could say, do, to make this any better.  His last attempt at a pep talk had been a woefully, miserable failure.  She couldn’t let this go (she never really let the girl go). 

And this was Andrew; _Andrew_ who absolutely adored Melinda.  

“Want to talk about it?”

He already knew the answer, but he had to ask.  Had to try because, God help him, he needed her to say yes.  To not bury this.  To try and keep breathing for him.  For Skye.  For S.H.I.E.L.D. For herself.  No matter how selfish any of that sounded.

“No.”

It stung more than he expected, but he didn’t let it deter him.  They were quiet for a few moments and Phil realized that this was the closest they had been to each other in over eight months.  His stomach felt sick. 

“What are you looking for?”

“Nothing.”

“Can I help?”

“No.”

Her voice progressively got softer with each word and he felt his heart sink with each syllable he pried from her. 

“Melinda,” his voice held an element of pleading. 

_“Go away.”_

They both knew that wasn’t happening and he leaned back against the wall and his hands came to rest on the cold tiles only to have the hand closest to Melinda meet something warm, sticky.

When he raised his hand up to see what it was, his fingertips were stained with blood. 

“Melinda?” 

Her eyes weren’t focus on him as she looked up at his face.  They were somewhere else entirely, somewhere he couldn’t reach her. 

Adrenaline coursed through his body like ice water.  _She was injured_ —she had been hurt in that abandoned building and she hadn’t told anyone.  He felt his heart rate spiral out of control and he reached out to wrap his hand around her wrist. 

Her body lurched back, a knee jerk reaction to the sudden contact, but his gaze focused on the amount of blood clinging to his partner’s body as he peeled the sweatshirt off his body. 

“Christ, Melinda.”

She needed Simmons.

::

Jemma said Melinda tried to sew up the wound with the bullet still inside.  He wished he could say that he was surprised. 

_He wasn’t._

::

Her eyes fluttered by the time he had read the file on the coffee table twice.  He moved to the other side of the table and leaned up against the couch where he had set her.  “Hey,” his voice was quiet, slow. 

English was always hard for her coming out of anesthesia.

Her fingers fluttered down to the stitches and gauze dressing, as she blinked sleepily.  “You took out my bullet,” her voice was groggy, “wh— _who said you could_ —maybe I didn’t want it out.”

He couldn’t help but smile gently at the hint of the accent of her words.  It was adorable, and he barely ever got the chance to hear it.  He brushed some of her hair out of her face before, “Yeah, well…you don’t get a choice anymore.” 

He kept his tone soft, affectionate, she had enough self-recrimination without him dishing out another unnecessary portion of guilt.

After surgery he had picked out one of Andrew’s large Princeton shirts and a pair of leggings once he got her to the safe house.  Melinda was well known for stealing other people clothes; his, Andrew’s, Maria’s, Clint’s.  She and Natasha practically shared a closet.  He was pretty sure aside from her custom combat suits and workout clothes, most of her clothes she had borrowed(— _stolen_ —)from other people.

He held up the file that had been sitting on the coffee table. 

“Wanna talk about this?”

Her eyes darkened immediately and Phil could almost visibly see her retreat. 

“Maria called you.”

There wasn’t a question in her words.  “When you didn’t answer one of the burners Helen Cho had for you, she called Maria.  They were worried.”

She sighed and rubbed her hands over her eyes.  It was the first sign of exhaustion she had given him since everything had gone to hell.  “There isn’t anything to talk about.  You read the results.”

His heart constricted painfully.

He remembered the night he lost his best friend like it was yesterday. 

He dreamed of it more vividly than he remembered it.  How one moment he had managed to get his partner out of that godforsaken building.  Finally got her to release the little girl’s body and make it towards the steps of the plane…and then there was just blood. 

_Blood everywhere._

The surgeon called it a traumatic miscarriage.

Admittedly, he would have been the coolest uncle ever, teaching the kid the best part of life, driving Lola around the block, getting their first tattoo, doing all the things that could potentially tick Andrew off that Melinda would have secretly found hilarious. 

Yeah, he would have been the favorite uncle.

_But Melinda would have been an even better mother._

::

The results from Helen Cho were “inconclusive”, which was the scientific way of saying that she had no idea if Andrew and Melinda’s baby would have been an inhuman. 

He would give anything to know what Andrew had said to her that made her scramble for test results like this, to uncover seven year old medical files, files he never tore her apart to find, and read, and send off to an old friend for analysis. 

Prejudice wasn’t in Melinda’s DNA—she would have adored that child regardless of their biology.  But something Andrew had said to her in that abandoned storage room that prompted this fear.

But Phil was pretty sure the absolute agony in her eyes wasn’t about that part of the result, but about the single line of text underneath it that said Dr. Cho was 95% certain that the fetus would have been a girl.

::

They ended up in bed. 

It wasn’t a total surprise to him.  He had been the one to initiate it.  Sex with Melinda was safe.  It had always been, despite their past track record with hurting each other. 

Any high level S.H.I.E.L.D. agent was familiar with the _thank-god-we’re-alive_ sex.  The feeling of the shock top adrenaline and the feeling of being a junkie for combat left most partners in bed with each other at some time or another.

But it was different with Melinda. 

_It was never filled with emptiness._

It happened less when they were on Strike Team Delta, for some reason being four was more balancing than two, though Romanova and Barton could never keep their hands off each other some days. 

It never happened during her marriage, but did once after her divorce before she left the field, when everything was broken shards and heartbroken and sex was the only way for him to plead with her to keep breathing, for him. 

Once after T.A.H.I.T.I. when he was convinced that he was going crazy, that he wasn’t Phil anymore, and it was the only way she could convince him that he was the same boy she knew from the Academy.

Anyone who called Melinda May “cold” clearly didn’t know her very well.  _She was fire_ : _bright, unrelenting and all consuming._

He was mindful of her stitches as he maneuvered them onto the bed, lips on her neck, but didn’t let it stop him from flipping her.  There was a line between hurt and painful and if he crossed it, Melinda would turn the tables on him.

But sometimes pain and Melinda was so indistinguishable from one another that he wondering if she would stop breathing on him one day.  That one minute she would be here beside him and the next she would be gone.  He watched her and the way she breathed.  He remember the old days of long stake out where she had tried to teach of him (badly) part of her tai chi routine and he could never quite copy her grace, her perfection, or her breathing.

He watched because sometimes, between the long, sometimes exaggerated breaths he was almost certain that she would choose to not take another one.

They moved like magnets, pushing and pulling against and towards each other and—just as they did in the field—they found a balance.  No one understood him like Melinda did; what he needed and when. 

_It made him love her even more._

::

Later, his arms were wrapped around her waists; loose enough to not be constricting, but tight enough for her to consciously know he was there for her.

His cheek rested on the top of her head and he could smell the jasmine in her hair that hadn’t changed since he met her twenty years earlier on their first day at the Academy. 

The light from the sunset outside the window reflected the tears on her cheeks.

“Mel?”

Her breath was suddenly shaky.  He tightened his arms around her.  “It’ll be okay,” he told her, “it’ll all work out, the ATCU will find a cure and we’ll all be okay.”  As far as pep talks and reassurances went, it wasn’t his best and he internally winced. 

Something in the way he said that made her lips twitch up into a smile, sad and ironic.  “You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.” 

There was no fight in her voice, she didn’t want to fight with him anymore.  That had been clear the moment she arrived back on base to tell him about Hunter and his stupid decision making.  He wanted to kiss her again, but didn’t.

“Please talk to me.”

She shook her head immediately, which means he knew he wouldn’t like whatever she had just been thinking. 

“I—it’s stupid.”

“I tell you all my stupid ideas.”

There was something about that statement that made her chuckle, the sound wet and sad, and for once he didn't feel better knowing he was the cause. 

“I don’t—” Melinda was never good with words, her action spoke the volumes she could never manage to articulate, “I just thought…it would be different this time.”

The image of the paper still sitting on the coffee table in the other room blew to the forefront of his mind.

_He wished it was._

::

It was dark when he awakened.  When he woke up his arms were still curled around her and he was secretly pleased.  May was still asleep, her chest rising and falling shallowly with her face tucked neatly between his chest and one of the pillows. 

She looked smaller tangled in the sheets, her hair obsidian against the off white sheets and her porcelain skin fragile in the early morning’s light.  Her stitches were buried somewhere under the blankets and he resisted the urge to check the wound; it would only wake her up and this was the first time since Andrew’s betrayal, he suspected, that Melinda’s slept at all.

The arm not wrapped around her reached to the end table where his SAT phone was blinking.  There were half a dozen texts from Daisy asking where the hell he and May had gone off to.  Two from Jemma demanding a status report on her patient. 

Four calls from Rosalind. 

There was a slightly ugly taste in the back of his throat, but he pushed it away without another thought.  Rosalind was work, he wasn’t supposed to be getting attached.  Not that it would work out in the long run between them anyways. 

That was the problem…that was always his big damn problem.  _No one was Melinda_.  Not Audrey.  Not Rosalind.  Not his short interlude with Michele from logistics.

None of them could truly compare to the woman curled up at his side.  She was exquisite, something he was never able to fully express in words. 

_She was simply Melinda._

He had watched her shatter, watched as the pieces sliced into her skin and the blood stained her skin, and watched as she walked away from the job she was born to do and the people that loved her most because it all hurt too much.

As if feeling his thoughts, Melinda grew restless at his side.  He turned his head back towards her slightly, tightening his arms around her tiny form just a smidge, not enough to wake her.  He knew a nightmare when he saw one.

The dream escalated quickly and Melinda went from restless to frightened.  He reached across to brush his knuckles across her cheek, hoping to still her. 

“Melinda?”  It was the softest tone he could manage.  Any quieter, it would be nonexistent and the words wouldn’t reach her.  “Try to breathe for me, okay?  Just relax.”

Her body recoiled slightly as his hand brushed her hair out of her face and Phil loosened his grip around her, feeling her struggle for peace.  Her face showed her distress; a mix of panic and pain and made his stomach knot itself sharply.  She was muttering, but he was unable to catch her words.  The little he knew of Cantonese wasn’t enough to understand what she was fighting against.

They hadn’t shared a bed since returning his carving compulsions had disappeared.

But he couldn’t try to convince himself that he knew her nightmares had gotten better.  He knew her—for better or worse—he knew how she thought and how she coped.  He knew just what wounds Daisy’s (Skye’s) betrayal would have ripped back open.

And now with Andrew—Phil felt his throat close up momentarily.  It was a miracle Melinda had let him in at all tonight. 

“Mel, everyone is safe.  It’s gonna be okay.  _You’re gonna be okay_.”

Her chest heaved up and down like she was drowning and Coulson felt pain rolling off her shoulders as she cried out in his arms.  Feeling desperation like nails to his core, Phil ran his hands up and down her spine, feeling each individual vertebrae as he ran it up and down, as her body shook for another briefest of second before relaxing. 

He didn’t bother wiping the tears off his cheeks.  Instead he drew her form into his and hoped that the security of his arms could penetrate her sleeping psyche.

“Phil?”  Her voice was raw, sleepy, confused.

“I’m here.”

One day, in this world, _perhaps another_ , it would hurt less to love her.

**Author's Note:**

> I hated the thought that Phil left May to her self-imposed exile to be with Rosalind. Did he miss the devastation on his best friend's face? (I don't think so). So I took some liberties with this one. Thoughts?


End file.
